PAGE 6 • SUMMER 2005 THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SAILING ASSOCIATION
FEATURED SAILBOAT • THE SULTANA
By Drew McMullen
To learn more about Sultana visit:
www.schoonersultana.org.
Chestertown, following the example set
by Boston, boarded a ship lying at
anchor in their harbor and dumped its
cargo of tea overboard.
The new Sultana was built under the
direction of Master Shipwright, John E.
Swain. Assisted by a small team of
professionals, Swain laid the keel for
Sultana in 1998 and launched her
almost three years later in the spring
of 2001. In every sense of the word,
Sultana’s construction was a
community undertaking. The cost of
building the small schooner was paid
for by countless donations from local
residents; more than three-thousand
school children visited the shipyard in
Chestertown to assist with Sultana’s
construction; and volunteers traveling
from as far away as Ohio and New York
The schooner Sultana, glides through the water under full sail. Sultana has carried
over 20,000 students for educational programs.
contributed over 150,000 man-hours
in labor.
O
n March 8, 1768, His Majesty’s Royal Navy In the four years since Sultana’s launch, the schooner
purchased what would prove to be the smallest has sailed as the “Schoolship of the Chesapeake,”
schooner ever to see active service in the British boarding 20,000 students from Maryland, Virginia and
Royal Navy. At just under 53 tons and 52-feet on deck, Washington, D.C., for under-sail educational programs
the schooner Sultana was the unlikeliest of warships. that encourage students to value the history and
Built by American shipwrights at Benjamin Hallowell’s environment of the Chesapeake Bay. Sailing with a crew
South Boston shipyard, Sultana had been conceived as a of professional educators, Sultana regularly visits ports
coastal merchant schooner. Destined for a life of hard throughout the Chesapeake, including Baltimore,
work in relative obscurity, Sultana’s fate changed forever Annapolis, St. Michaels, Oxford, Cambridge, Solomons,
when the British Parliament enacted the notorious Washington and Norfolk.
R
Townsend Acts or “Tea Taxes” just as Sultana was being
framed in the Hallowell Yard in the summer of 1767.
Along with a handful of other small American-built
schooners, Sultana would be bought by the Royal Navy
and see almost five years of active duty patrolling for
American smugglers from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the
Chesapeake Bay.
Two hundred and thirty years later, a handful of people
from the small town of Chestertown, Md., decided to
build a full-scale replica of Sultana. Though more than
two centuries had passed since the Revolution, the story
of British taxation was one familiar to every resident of
this well-preserved colonial port. Each May more than Photo by Lucian Neimeyer
15,000 people assemble on the banks of the Chester
A crew prepares to launch the schooner Sultana. Volunteers put
River to reenact the day in 1772 when the residents of
in over 150,000 man hours on this ship.
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